Post #1106236

Personally, I think a football player sitting during the anthem is ineffectual. It’s less effective even than temporarily adding an overlay to your Facebook avatar after a crisis.

If the people who sit want to help the cause for which they protest, they should do so in a way that matters. You can’t show solidarity to the BLM community by sitting unless the camera notices you doing it and the media jumps up and down accordingly. So I think the people who sit should be ignored, because it deflates their method of protest entirely.

It’s similar to how Trump wouldn’t have won the primary had he not been given all the media attention. Just ignore them, and their opinion becomes moot.

A player sitting during the anthem is so ineffectual you think the media should ignore it (instead of jumping up and down accordingly) - so it will deflate their method of protest entirely?

Erm… what?

Well, I’ve been trying to stay out of this one so far, but I think I can translate. I think he’s saying it’s ineffectual in that it doesn’t communicate the message you’re trying to send, not that it doesn’t successfully grab media attention. i.e. the media ruckus becomes about sitting and flags and whatnot, and not about your actual grievances, therefore it’s ineffectual.

I haven’t actually formed an opinion on the concept of media grabbing yet. It does seem to be central to the “Stay Woke” thesis – that unless your reminders that racism and brutality exists are adequately loud and outrageous, your protests will eventually turn into background noise and the media (and therefore the majority) will tune them out, fall back into a slumber, and think everything must be fine now. BLM has embraced this and while they’ve clearly gotten some backlash, the media’s focus on police racism and brutality has definitely been longer and more critical recently than during any recent prior protest movement, and I’d say police racism and brutality is actually much less prevalent today than in the years past when it was barely covered at all. So did BLM succeed with confrontational protest tactics? Or is it the fact that almost every citizen carries around a video camera these days and stuff can’t be explained away as easily as it used to? Or a combination. I really don’t know.